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Comment by a3w | Hacker News Reader

332 MHz Dual ARM 11 ?! Half-Life ran smooth in Pentium 100 single core.

Then, they added Steam, and my Celeron 300 had trouble running it. Shit by Valve to coule games with a mandatory subscriber agreement. Even breaks EU law to "one-sided change" it again and again later, to keep access to your game library.

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It doesn't have a dual CPU or dual-core CPU. It's one CPU core plus a DSP core (which is probably not used by the game).

Quake ran smooth on a Pentium 100. Half-Life absolutely wouldn't have, even at 320x240.

I played it back when it came out on a P166 in software mode and it was fine at that resolution.

I did the same, I do wonder if it holds up as well as my memory remembers. Probably not.

Like I remember Doom running fine on my 486 SX 25Mhz, but looking back at it now, it wasn't that great. It took a top end Pentium to really get it into smooth-ish 20fps+ territory.

The crunchiness of the software rendering from that era is embedded in my memory like visual dial up handshake noise.

Of course no.

DOOM wasn't fine on Am486DX4 100MHz and Ziggurat Vertigo was like 5fps at best on it.

Ziggurat Vertigo was Quake, not Doom.

>> DOOM wasn't fine on Am486DX4 100MHz and [Quake's] Ziggurat Vertigo was like 5fps at best on it.

Are you happy now?

Pentium 100 couldn't even play Quake2 properly. You probably mean Pentium 2 series.

Pentium 1 133mhz ran Quake2 pretty darn well as long as you had hardware accel. Without hadware accel it was ass.

(maybe even Pentium 100)

nope. 14fps on pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram in 512x400 or similar mode (640x480 was too much)

Yeah, I remember playing it on a P233MHz without a 3D graphics card... It was sort of playable, but any alpha-blended effects like muzzle flashes or explosions slowed it to single-digit FPS for a second :D Still, I played it through like that. Today's gamers complain if a game momentarily drops below 60fps or whatever.

Yeah, I get why people want it to be smooth but when you hear somethings I do wonder if folks could be a little more patient.

"My game froze for 100ms on a one time shader compilation dropping... totally unplayable!"

I get it, shader compilation is a little pain point but it isn't that bad. Some compilation times are less than the frame times we used to play at in the 80's/90's.

If you condition yourself to be OK with 15-25 fps, it's almost fine. If you run a game at 60FPS generally, then an occasional hiccup of 100ms will really throw you off. Similarly, the gameplay must be designed differently between low and high FPS games - you don't want the player to feel like they'd have been able to play the game differently if it was running smoother.

Didn't you have a Voodoo-card or something? I'm quite sure I could run HL1 on a P166 with a Voodoo-card with ok frame rate.

With a Voodoo I assume you could get it up to 30fps fairly comfortably but they still weren't the most common back then.

Still remember the concern when Quake 3 would require a GPU as they were not entirely ubiquitous then. It was the right more and it helped the industry forward but it was a little pain point at that time.

Nope . Software renderer.

Quake 2 and Half life had pure software renderer for people who didn't have 3D acceleration cards such as Voodoo.

It was slow but worked on ANY graphical card :)

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